Discipline Is Creative Play

How Little Efforts Compound to Make Art

“I’m an artist. I give my life to art. That’s all there is. People in my life have come and gone and come and gone. Mostly they’ve gone. I give my life to art because it stays. That’s what I am. An artist. I make art.” She paused for a moment. “It’s what time doesn’t ruin.”

–Orkideh, in Martytr! by Kaveh Akbar

---

Okay, hear me out.

Artists need discipline. Discipline involves effort.

Effort is worthwhile because it’s our work.

Our work is serious, creative play.

Discipline, to me, is a commitment to process; it’s the knowledge that tiny acts practiced daily compound, becoming something greater.

When we invite others to view our art, what they experience is the illumination of a process that they’ll never know, not the way the artist knows the process. The artist is in relationship with the process. The viewer is in relationship with the art.

Creative processes are personal. They’re ours to relax into, to blow off, to hold too tightly, to harmonize with. In order to survive as an artist, we have to fall in love with our process. A rollercoaster process-romance has its crests and troughs (art imitates life, after all) but it’s up to us to structure our process so we can rise and fall with it, riding the rising wave, and the crashing one, steadying the surfboard.

To make our work, some degree of discipline is essential. And yet, as artists, we need freedom and openness too – how else would we dream, and imagine?

One tool which artists can use to toe the line between discipline and spaciousness is protected artistic time. This is a chunk of time for focused creative work, free of distractions. I first encountered this idea while I was working with Double Edge Theater, in central Massachusetts.

During protected artistic time, the artist is fed, safely unreachable¹, and the protected time fits inside of their survival equation. That time can be used however the artist wants to use it: the point is to explore, to ideate, to draw, to write, to move, to unleash and follow the stream of imagination wherever it leads. All it takes is carving out the time, finding the space where the work will happen (at Double Edge, the work could take place all over the farm, which was a gift), and committing diligently to the work for an hour, or two hours, or three.

Or for ten minutes, or twenty, or thirty. There’s a great essay by Ursula K. LeGuin about interstitiality; about how life is full of moments when we’re in between two places, eyes closed and traveling, and how these connective moments ought to be regarded as real parts of life, eyes open and traveling, not just moments-in-transit to move past. When I commute to my job, I spend about 50 minutes in my city’s transit system, minutes I can engage to read, to center, to write, and to rest. Commutes are a perfect container for creativity – I know how long I have until my transfer, and then how long I have until my stop. There are two clearly defined periods into which I can work.

A writing practice that operates within a commute container is a writing practice that happens for 30 minutes each day we commute (minus days we choose to rest). 30 minutes a day, say, four days a week, becomes two hours spent each week writing. That’s enough to write the shitty first draft of a short essay. The commute is the container, and within the container, the freedom to work.

I don’t propose that we work during our interstices every single day, I’m not an Atomic Habits person. I just think that if we’re seriously committed to a particular artistic project, or to any project, and if we want it to be physically realized in performance, or as words or images, we need to work on it most days. “Most days” because if we miss a day it’s okay, but also because we may want to look back in a year, ten years, and see that we’ve created something new for the world, bit by bit, by crafting it more days than not.

When I took an improvisational dance class in college, I learned quickly that complete open-endedness stifles creativity for me, while a clear and specific container liberates it. To move the body with no direction is to feel like a fleck of ash drifting through the sky after a fireworks show. To move the body as if it is the fleck of ash engages embodied imagination.

Small acts of effort, practiced daily, compound, and can lead to great change. It’s like Albert Einstein maybe said: “compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe.” Creativity requires discipline, but the discipline doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing ultimatum, a steely effort. It’s an effort like the effort of watering a plant: something is growing, forming into an object which can be presented (like how a seed forms into a flower), and it needs to be watered and tended, as the weather changes, to nurture its formation.

Maybe there’s an interstice in the rhythm of your life that you channel your work into, most days. Maybe it’s ten minutes of writing that happen while the rice is cooking. The very act of doing the thing, and doing it most days, is how you fall in love with the process, and how it changes. By practicing our process, we learn how to begin.

How does one find that beautiful balance between the discomfort in beginning and the love for the working? How do we walk the line between creative boundaries that liberate and creative freedom that paralyzes? How do we begin to enact of sustainable version of creative discipline? How do we create containers in which we can work?

Idk. Let me know if you know?

---

1. I. e. phone-free. For people who are caregivers, being phone-free isn’t required.